Update: This article was originally posted on July 27, 2019. It has been updated with new information and tips below.
One of the most difficult parts of applying for a graduate degree in business administration can be creating a truly compelling essay. How do you make an MBA essay not only sound like you but also really stand out from the crowd?
This can be especially intimidating with so little space. You may have a lot you wish the admissions board to know about you. But how do you reduce that down to a 500-word essay while at the same time making sure you say everything you should?
Don’t fret – instead, focus on a few key elements that will help you down that path.
Worried about word count?
So what is the first step to writing a compelling MBA essay in 500 words?
Forget about your word count.
Go ahead – let’s even take it to extremes. Take your ideas about word count, crumple them up, and throw them in the recycling bin. Or hide them in with the dirty laundry or wherever else you know you won’t look until you’re on the final draft of your essay. Did that? Good.
Although most essays will have a word limit, that is not where you should begin – and it is definitely not what you should focus on while trying to develop your MBA admissions essay. In fact, trimming word count is the very last thing you should do before you finalize your draft.
We will revisit the subject of word count at the end of the process – and at the end of this post. Until then, keep it in the laundry.
The three keys to a compelling essay: theme, story, and structure
So, you might ask, if I shouldn’t focus on word count, what should I be thinking about?
There are three answers to this question: theme, story, and structure. But what are these exactly?
Your theme is like your topic. It is the main thing you want your readers to know and remember about you while reading your essay. Everything – and I mean absolutely everything – in your MBA essay should pertain to and relate back to your theme.
Story is how you express your theme. An MBA essay can have one or multiple stories. Your stories are personal (as in, they really did happen to you!) anecdotes about your past that contribute to the person you are today. These must (underline must) relate back to your theme.
Structure is how you combine the two in a way that makes it easy for your reader to get from one idea to the next. A strong structure will reinforce the meaning of your essay.
All three of these elements are interrelated, and all are necessary for creating a truly compelling MBA admissions essay. Now that you’ve got the basics, there is a lot more to learn. Let’s take a look at each of these key points in detail.
Key #1: Theme
The first key, or element, of a compelling essay is a strong theme. Your theme is the main message of your essay. Basic examples may be “teamwork is paramount” or “empowering others is what I value most”. Your choice of theme will depend on the essay question.
A theme is important for your MBA essay because it is what ties everything you say together. Instead of random stories that have no common thread, your theme is what allows you to use multiple stories to reinforce what you really want to say about yourself.
Looking for example 500-word essays to help you start writing? Our MBA Resource Center has dozens of successful sample essays, in addition to all types of essays from countless schools, brainstorm guides, resume templates, interview mocks and answer models, and much more. Find out more about your one-stop shop for MBA application success here.
How do you choose your theme? A question of values
So how do you go about choosing the right theme?
Your theme expresses a value (ex: “community”, “giving back”, “innovation”) that you feel has defined you in some way. You can choose practically any value that you can relate back to your personal experiences. However, it is essential that you choose a value you truly believe in – faking it to sound good will be immediately obvious to any admissions board.
A good theme also relates back to the school and its values. The school’s values will give you an idea of who the school is looking for, and you should always take these into account when choosing your theme. Each school will have different, individual values.
The school’s values may be implicit or explicit – you may need to take a long look at their website, visit their campus, ponder their motto, or study their application materials to figure out what they are. (If you find yourself struggling to determine these, this is something that our editors at Ellin Lolis Consulting are glad to help you with.)
For example, when applying to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, their values include the following:
Global awareness, community-oriented, integrity, collaborative team leadership, passion, intellectual vitality, etc.
The theme of your Stanford essay should not, therefore, simply be “integrity” or “global awareness”. Instead, give the value a personal touch that says something about you: for example, you could go with “honesty above everything” or “the importance of an international team”. If you’ve chosen your theme well, it may even overlap with multiple values of your target school.
We have seen clients use a wide range of diverse themes to create successful essays that landed them a spot in their top MBA program. For example, one client used the theme of solving a Rubik’s cube to demonstrate their drive for problem-solving. Another client used the theme of ballet to express her values of determination. Other clients have used topics like their cultural heritage, learning from past failures, or family hardship as successful themes.
Keep in mind that your choice of theme must answer the essay question. While this might be easy in open-ended essays, some answers may require much deeper thought to determine your underlying values.
Theme: roadblocks and solutions
The most common problem pertaining to theme often comes down to this: too many or too few. Even if you’ve chosen the most awesome theme, encountering either one of these problems could make or break your MBA admissions essay.
How can you have too many themes? It may be hard to narrow down what you value most or which of your target school’s values is the most important to you. If you can’t decide, you may end up trying to build in more than one. You may begin your essay by exuberantly exclaiming the importance of teamwork while emphasizing how much your community means to you in your conclusion. This discrepancy will not only confuse your reader, it will lead to a weak message and a weak essay.
On the other hand, your theme must be explicitly clear. You cannot assume that your reader will simply understand your theme after reading your essay. You must state this for them multiple times.
Either option will cause your theme to feel unclear to your reader. Make sure you have a single theme (even if it might represent multiple values!) that you clearly stick with throughout the entire essay.
Key #2: Story
Stories are the examples you use to underline your theme.
They should be based on your personal experiences and are the most tangible element of your MBA admissions essay. The choices here are endless, and may come from the workplace, school, or your personal life.
If you are having trouble coming up with ideas, this article in The Economist offers some good starting points. The most important thing is that your stories illustrate how they have contributed to the value that you’ve presented in your theme.
How to choose the best stories? Theme and story go hand in hand
The stories you choose need to relate to your theme. Your theme will relate to your stories. The two of these – and choosing them – go hand in hand.
You may first brainstorm inspiring stories from your past and then choose which theme aligns with them. Or you may want to start by contemplating your theme and then deciding where it has been exemplified in your past. Either method will work, as long as you use honest examples and really believe in your theme.
If you find yourself at an impasse, however – where you just can’t get your stories to align with your theme – we find it best to rethink your theme. After all, you can choose your theme freely, while your stories must be limited to personal experiences from your past.
How many stories you tell in your MBA essay depends on your theme and the topic of the essay (and possibly your word count!). In some cases, you may need multiple stories while in others a single story will suffice.
What makes a good story? You do.
A good story can be a lesson you learned, a challenge you faced, or an experience that you will never forget. Remember here that the admissions board already has your CV, so a good story is by no means a recap of your professional history. Instead, your stories should touch on the things that the admissions board cannot see in your CV: your personality.
This means your stories need to dig deep into personal questions. What made a situation challenging? How did this experience make you who you are today? What lessons did you learn? A good story highlights motivations, feelings, and attitudes behind the information on your CV.
As you can see, a story is not only action. It has two parts: the experience itself and what you learned from it. In our experience, it is best to use the well-known STAR method to make this format clear to readers.
STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Results. All of these elements must be clear in each story you tell in your MBA admissions essay. They can be used to tell almost any story.
For example, let’s take a look at a passage from a client’s IESE essay:
“For example, when I worked as a site engineer coordinating dredging works (Situation), I saw an opportunity to give workers that I saw potential in the chance to learn specific technical work. We had over 12 workers with no post-secondary education responsible only for timekeeping machinery activities on site. I knew that, after the job was done, they would struggle to find new work. (Task) I decided to choose some of them to assist our hydrographic survey technicians collecting and processing survey data a few days per week, a crucial activity for the project’s success. (Action) I was proud that two of them could learn their responsibilities quickly enough to start working as full-time survey assistants even after the job was finished. (Results)
In this passage, using the STAR method really helps the client clearly present a story that shows his proactivity and highlights both external (that his employees started working full-time) and internal (that he was proud) results. The client used this story to underline his theme of supporting others.
To understand more about aligning your theme with your stories, let’s go back to our Stanford example where we’ve chosen the theme “the importance of an international team”. A good story here might be:
- A time you’ve led an international team at your firm and the benefits it brought to the project;
- Talking about time you’ve spent abroad and how this changed your perspective;
- How you helped international students in college and what you learned from the experience
Story: roadblocks and solutions
The main problem you see with stories in MBA essays is that they do not match the theme. If this is the case, you need to rethink your story – or your theme.
In contrast to your theme, you cannot have too much information at this stage in your essay (you’ve hidden away all your ideas about word count, remember?). Remember here that although the details about what happened, how you felt about it, or why an event was significant may be clear to you, it will not always be clear to your reader. Including sufficient information about context, your motivations, and what you learned is essential to make sure your message is clear.
This is where a second set of eyes is absolutely necessary. Our editors here at Ellin Lolis Consulting are good at spotting the details that may be implicit in your essay, but have not been stated clearly enough for all your readers.
Another common problem is not highlighting your role in the story. Even if the experience was a team effort – and even if teamwork is your theme – it is necessary to highlight the individual part you played. After all, the admissions board is focusing on you.
Key #3: Structure
The third essential element to a compelling MBA admissions essay is your structure. Your structure is like your map: it helps your readers get flawlessly from A to B.
In terms of your essay, this means that structure helps your reader transition between what you said before, what you’re saying now, and what you will say next.
Without a solid, clear, and defining structure, your essay can be good, but won’t be excellent. Your stories may be fascinating – but only if your reader understands why they are reading about them in the first place. In other words, structure implicitly emphasizes relevance.
How is a typical MBA essay structured?
Although this will vary according to the topic of the essay, the basic outline is often similar, as pointed out by Karen Schweitzer. The outline of your MBA essay will usually have the following format:
- Introduction: present your theme and its larger contextual significance
- Story 1 and the lesson(s) you learned from it
- Story 2 and the lesson(s) you learned from it (if the essay prompt allows for more than one story)
- (Maybe more stories and lessons…)
- How your stories/theme relate to your target school (such as classes you intend to take, groups you want to participate in, or the unique things that the school offers that will help you expand on these values)
- Conclusion: tie all of this back into your theme
Keep in mind that this is only a basic outline for an MBA admissions essay, and there are other formats that may work just as well. You may find a different format works better for your message. In that case – go for it!
No matter which format you choose, however, make sure your reader can clearly and easily understand and navigate the structure of your essay. With thousands of other essays to read, sending a confusing essay to “stand out” is likely to get your essay tossed aside.
What makes a good structure? Sandwiches.
How do you ensure that your MBA essay is well-structured? Here, it is best to rely on the classic sandwich method.
The sandwich method ensures that each of your stories (the lettuce, meat, cheese, and other particularly yummy parts of your structural sandwich) is surrounded by an explicit emphasis on your theme (the bread that holds your structural sandwich together).
You are going to need a few structural sandwiches for a good essay. Not only should the essay itself be one big sandwich, but each paragraph – each story – needs to be one as well. In other words:
Sandwich #1: The essay as a whole
In your essay-structural-sandwich, your theme needs to surround your stories. The introduction of your essay should clearly present your theme and your conclusion needs to pick it back up.
Sandwich #2: Each and every story
Each story needs an introduction sentence and a concluding sentence. Both of these sentences need to relate your story back to your theme.
The sandwich method is a way to ensure your reader stays on the same page as you. They make it explicitly clear why what you are saying is relevant to the larger picture and how you got there in the first place.
Hungry? Have an example sandwich
In spring 2017, we helped Axel from Argentina compose and refine his Stanford essays. In this essay, he chose to focus on the theme “being an agent of change”. Take a look at one of the stories he told to highlight this theme:
“Later, while volunteering in São Paulo’s favelas, I wanted to convey the power of change to children by showing them what I learned from the book on the cosmos. By connecting my hobby of space with my desire for change, I shared my knowledge of cosmology and mathematics and gained valuable lessons from people with backgrounds in education. In learning from each other’s strengths, we were able to complement the children’s formal education and inspired them to look at past science geniuses who defied conventions so that the students might also be inspired to challenge their social standing. This experience showed me that working to create change is as important as its positive effects.”
As you can see in bold, the relevance of this story to Axel’s theme is clear in both the introduction and conclusion of the paragraph.
Looking for example essays to help you start writing? Our MBA Resource Center has dozens of successful sample essays, in addition to all types of essays from countless schools, brainstorm guides, resume templates, interview mocks and answer models, and much more. Find out more about your one-stop shop for MBA application success here.
Managing word count: the final step to a stunning MBA essay
Now that you have the three key elements of your MBA admissions essay down – theme, story, and structure – it is time to go dig your ideas about word count back out of the dirty laundry.
You may find yourself with an essay that is way too long. How can you go about shortening it?
Although this may seem like a challenge, it is one you can overcome. Our editors are very practiced at this, and are glad to help you if you get stuck. For example, in a recent essay for UCLA, one of our clients found herself with an essay of nearly 900 words; the limit for the essay was 500. Using the following strategies, we were able to get her word count down to 486.
Strategy #1: Revisit your stories
The easiest way to reduce word count is to take another pass at each of your stories. Are there any parts that are repetitive? Is there anything that is not essential to the story? Tangents? Searching for these is a good way to drastically reduce your word count.
Strategy #2: Reduce “of” constructions
There are two ways to express possession in English. Take a look at the difference between these two sentences:
“I won the admiration of my supervisor” (7 words) vs. “I won my supervisor’s admiration” (5 words)
Simply by trading out the “of” phrase here and replacing it with the possessive noun phrase, you can make your sentences shorter.
Strategy #3: Reduce “I think/wish/believe…” phrases
Everything in your essay is authored by you, a fact that is obvious to your admissions board. Beginning sentences with “I think…” phrases are, therefore, unnecessary. Removing phrases like this not only reduces word count, it will also make your statements stronger. Take a look at the following example:
“I believe that Stanford Graduate School of Business will be the key to furthering my professional career.” (17 words)
Now take a look at the sentence with the “I think…” phrase removed:
“Stanford Graduate School of Business will be the key to furthering my professional career.” (14 words)
Strategy #4: Reduce passive voice
You are the center of your essay, so the action should always be focused on you. This means you should avoid being the object of the sentence and passive voice.
Take a look at this example:
“The project was completed by my team in November 2017.” (10 words)
Here, the project is the subject of the sentence and in focus, not your team. Instead, you could bring the focus back to you by phrasing it like this:
“My team completed the project in November 2017.” (8 words)
This is only one example of passive voice and how you can reduce it in your MBA admissions essay, but there are other passive constructions that you can watch for. If you want to learn more about how to avoid passive voice, the University of Toronto offers some insightful writing advice on the topic.
Get Expert Help
At Ellin Lolis Consulting, we have a lot of practice helping clients cut words and reduce their message to what is truly important – part of what we call technical editing. To read more about what else we offer in terms of technical editing – and its big brother strategic editing – take a look at our blog post.
These tips will help reduce your word count while unlocking your MBA essay’s true potential. Not only will their application limit your essay to the most essential information, but it will also make sure your reader gets an authentic look at the person behind the words.
Now that you have the most useful keys for a stunning MBA admissions essay, it is time to create one that will have the admissions board hoping you will choose to attend their school.
As long as you’ve expressed a clear theme, backed it up with personalized stories, and packed it into a structural sandwich, your MBA essay is sure to stand out from the crowd.
If you still feel unsure about your essay, need some help brainstorming, or just want an extra pair of eyes, reach out to our team. Our team has the writing abilities and the marketing know-how to transform your essay into an attention-grabbing piece that will get you a spot in your top-choice MBA program. Remember, we’re here to help!
If you still feel unsure about your essay, need some help brainstorming, or just want an extra pair of eyes, reach out to our team. Our team has the writing abilities and the marketing know-how to transform your essay into an attention-grabbing piece that will get you a spot in your top-choice MBA program. Remember, we’re here to help!
Real MBA Essays That Got People In
School-specific sample essays that got our clients accepted
